"Weimar Germany was a comprehensive crisis, and thus a very peculiar, specific time when people were ready to see the qualities of a national savior in Hitler"

“Hitler,” says Ian Kershaw, “had a deep-seated, lasting sense of revenge—something you don’t come across in history too often.” In Hitler, his magisterial two-volume biography now condensed into one, Kershaw caps 30 years of studying the führer and Nazi Germany in key works like The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich and Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution.

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Here he painstakingly traces the many tangled contexts—historical, psychological, cultural—that enabled this incurious narcissist’s rise to power on the wings of revenge, and culminated in the horrors of World War II.

For Kershaw, Hitler’s life teaches powerful lessons: “He comes to power in a democracy. He uncovers the thin ice on which modern civilization rests, and shows us what we’re capable of as human beings.”

Crunching two volumes into one—what was that like?
Extremely painful. It was like Mozart in Amadeus: “What do you think, Majesty?” “Oh, quite good, Mozart, but too many notes.” Reducing 2,000 pages to 800 meant eliminating the footnotes and bibliography—something no historian likes to do. Then I had to reduce the text from 1,400 to 800 pages. One choice was to eliminate context, like the descriptions of Vienna in Hitler’s youth. Since my aim was to document the relationship between Hitler and the environment that produced him, I felt uneasy about that. The one-volume work is more Hitler-centric.

You don’t think Hitler was a madman.
I’ve never had any truck with that. People with medical backgrounds have examined the evidence and rejected the idea that Hitler was insane. But it should also be rejected on another level. Maybe the project was mad, but the man was not. Saying Hitler was insane is just an apologia for him, isn’t it? He’s not in charge of his actions, not responsible for his deeds. Then you’ve got to ask, “Why did 60 million Germans follow a madman?” So it’s an apologia for them too.

 You see Hitler in terms of Max Weber’s notion of charismatic authority. Could you explain?
Weber’s concept is not like saying Barack Obama has charisma. It describes a relationship. Charisma is in the eyes of the beholder. So it’s not saying the individual has fantastic personal qualities, but that in times of comprehensive crisis, people invest feelings of hopes or expectations or salvation in an individual they see as possessing extraordinary qualities. Charismatic authority is an emergency arrangement. Weimar Germany was a comprehensive crisis, and thus a very peculiar, specific time when people were ready to see the qualities of a national savior in Hitler.

So he wasn’t inevitable.
There’s a symbiosis between this strange individual and that time and place. For all its crises, Weimar was a vibrant democracy, with lots of liberal freedoms and things we admire. Hitler and his followers portrayed his rise as the result of the power of will alone, but you can see how he was able to exploit opportunities and circumstances. He exploited the weakness of his opponents to get closer to power. Power only comes to him in the context of the Great Depression. On its eve, Hitler’s party won 2.6 percent of the popular vote. Within five years his party is the largest in Germany, and he’s on the verge of being given power by conservative groups.

When did he first realize his oratorical power?
Having been hospitalized for mustard gas poisoning and experienced Germany’s defeat and revolution by the detested Social Democrats, he goes back into the army. There he gets a real political opportunity for the first time. He is sent to a camp near Augsburg for demobilized soldiers, where he gives a series of lectures in August 1919. Among the lecturers, Hitler is the star. All at once he realizes what an impact his speeches are having. In Mein Kampf, on two occasions, he writes, “And then I learned I could speak.”

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